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Two beekeepers strive to breed a stronger queen honeybee to survive Portland winters

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Glen Andresen and Tim Wessels founded Bridgetown Bees because they were tired of losing up to 40 percent of their bees every winter. Their goal is to breed a queen bee that can withstand Portland winters, and they’ve turned their backyards in Northeast Portland into a laboratory. The two examine a hive in Tim Wessels’ backyard.
(Elizabeth Case, The Oregonian)

Honeybees zoom through canes heavy with marionberries and pink raspberries. Pollen clings to their hind legs as they duck inside one of the boxed hives stacked throughout Glen Andresen's yard in Northeast Portland.

Flowers drip with nectar and food is plentiful now. But come the cold, damp winter, these bees are in trouble. Last winter about 40 percent of hives in the urban area died, mirroring losses around the country.

Fellow beekeeper Tim Wessels lives less than a mile away and struggled with the same die-off. Together, Wessels and Andresen stash about 100 hives on their own property, rented land and in friends' yards. Replacing hives at $100 each adds up quickly.

The two are searching for a local solution to a national problem. Wessels and Andresen founded Bridgetown Bees to breed and market a hardier queen bee that can survive Portland winters.

Breeding a queen beeBeekeepers Glen Andresen and Tim Wessels founded Bridgetown Bees in the hopes of breeding a queen bee that can withstand Portland's winter.

"Backyard beekeeping is the new backyard chickens," said Wessels, also president of the Portland Urban Beekeepers. "If they are losing them every year, they're just throwing good money at bad and eventually they're going to get discouraged."

Part of the problem is that beekeepers in the Northwest often import bees from warmer climates, especially California, said Dewey Caron, an affiliate professor at Oregon State University who made a name for himself in the honeybee industry at the University of Delaware. The imports produce honey prolifically at the beginning of the season, but struggle in fall and winter.

"They're just not holding up through the season," Caron said.

A regionally bred bee could reduce the need for imports, diminish losses and increase the number of beekeepers who stick with the trade, Wessels and Andresen hope.

Beekeeping suffered in the 20th century -- managed hives dropped from five million in the 1940s to half that today. However, many farmers rely heavily on commercial honeybees to pollinate crops. An extreme example: California's almond industry depends 100 percent on rented hives.

Nowadays, hobbyist and commercial beekeepers are much more likely to lose hives not only to winter, but to colony collapse disorder, where whole hives mysteriously disappear, leaving farmers struggling and keepers suffering bee losses of 30 to 90 percent.

Andresen and Wessels aren't alone in their quest to breed a better bee. In an effort to combat colony collapse, some scientists are building a bee to withstand mites and beetles; others are breeding for honey production or gentleness. Andresen and Wessels select their queens to improve yearly survival rates without antibiotics or extra pollen, but they face plenty of obstacles.

Rearing royalty

Honeybees are superorganisms -- no single one can live long on its own -- and the queen is the only reproducing female. A honeybee's duties depend on its gender and environment as a larva.

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Drones, all male, hatch from unfertilized eggs and live for only a few weeks in summer to reproduce -- they can't even collect enough pollen to feed themselves.

Workers and queens, both female, emerge from fertilized eggs. Nurse bees -- young workers -- feed certain larvae extra royal jelly, a substance secreted by glands near a bee's mouth. Those that receive substantially more jelly become queens. The others hatch into workers, which live about six weeks, cleaning the hive, caring for the young and foraging for food.

Newly emerged virgin queens fly up to a mile in search of drone congregations, while males will travel about a half mile. For breeding, this makes controlling the local drone population paramount. If the queen mates with drones from hives that did not overwinter here, winter-resistant traits in her offspring could be diluted. So Andresen and Wessels station their hives within a two-mile radius and ask nearby beekeepers to keep only overwintered hives within mating distance of their queens.

A queen mates with 10 to 20 drones in her early and only voyages out of the hive, then never mates again. Queens can live up to five years, laying thousands of eggs a day in the summer.

Andresen and Wessels don't just leave their queens to nature. They encourage the growth of dozens of queens at a time using the Doolittle method, a common breeding technique. Andresen has a breeding lab in his yard, a small room that also serves as a honey store, where they delicately handle dozens of young queens at a time.

The breeders carefully scoop young larvae out of their hive with an instrument similar to a dental pick and transfer them to queen cups, pieces of wax or plastic that look like tiny candleholders. Larvae must be 12 to 36 hours old, and any trauma during the move jeopardizes survival.

Up to 45 larvae are placed in a new hive stripped of its queen 24 hours beforehand. In survival mode, the bees rush to foster the new queen cells, feeding them an excess of royal jelly. Two weeks later, the queen cocoons are a day or two from hatching.

Breeders must police the starter hives for natural cocoons from the hive's previous queen, or risk the deaths of their entire batch of new queens. The early life of a queen bee is vicious. When a queen larva hatches, she seeks out other queens and stings them to death -- or is killed by one who hatched sooner -- transforming the hive into a winner-takes-all gladiator arena.

Each cocoon is placed in her own box with hundreds of nurse bees. She hatches, mates in the first few weeks of her life, and the life cycle begins anew.

Bee-friendly neighbor

Andresen and Wessels lean over a box in their bee mating yard in the Sabin neighborhood. They check a batch of queens to see if they have started to lay eggs. Both men comb their hair to the same side and grow the same beard: trimmed short, white as their beekeeping suits. Andresen is taller and lankier, Wessels shorter and tanned. Wessels retired after 32 years at the Port of Portland, but his bees keep him occupied day to day. Andresen took over a neighbor's hives 20 years ago and now teaches beekeeping at Portland Community College and elsewhere.

The business partners do much of their work without protection -- a hive is calm unless startled.

"A sting a day keeps the doctor away," Andresen jokes.

Once they ensure the survival of this batch of queens, they will breed one last group this season.

Most of this year's queens will establish the Bridgetown breed, and the business partners expect to sell them as early as next year. However, they caution it will take a few more seasons to determine if the stock can consistently resist Portland's winter.

But for now, it's still midsummer, and the bee breeders have things other than winter in mind: choosing the next batch of eggs to breed and building new boxes for the queens to establish their hives.